In the shipping provider and/or manufacturing industry, weight determining technology may have been used to determine the weights of items on a conveyor for the purpose of revenue recovery. Conveyors (alternately herein referred to as “conveyor systems” and/or “conveying systems”) are common pieces of mechanical handling equipment that move materials from one location to another. Many kinds of conveying systems are available, and are used according to the various needs of different industries. Types of conveyor systems, in the prior art, may include (among other things) flexible conveyor systems and heavy duty roller conveyors.
In the prior art, weight determining technology may have included a scale using four load cells arranged at the corners of a solid platform for the determination of item weight. FIGS. 1A and 1B depict plan and side views, respectively, of one such system having a load cell at each corner of the scale wherein the load cells are positioned beneath a conveyor belt. This arrangement of load cells may have calculated item weight by summing and/or averaging the weight determinations from each load cell. Accordingly, this prior art weight determining technology may have only been adapted to determine the weight of a single item, or the average weight of two or more items, at any given time or the weight. In order to determine the weight of a single item, items may have been required to be arranged, with respect to the conveyor's direction of travel, in a singulated (i.e., in single-file and/or in a single row) and spaced manner (i.e., non-abutting and/or with sufficient gaps between items, perhaps so that only one item is on a scale at a given time). FIG. 2 depicts a plan view of items having a singulated and spaced arrangement.
In a shipping provider and/or manufacturing facility, however, items may frequently be received and/or conveyed in a non-singulated arrangement (i.e., not single-file) and/or in a non-spaced arrangement (i.e., abutting or only with very small gaps). The non-singulated arrangement may be either with respect to a direction of travel of the conveyor or a direction that is transverse to the direction of travel of the conveyor. FIG. 3 depicts a plan view of items having a non-singulated and non-spaced arrangement. Non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangements of items may have presented challenges to previous weight determining technologies, and attempts to determine item weights may not have yielded useful results for items in such arrangements. For example, prior art weight dimensioning technologies may not have been able to distinguish between the respective weights of various items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement, in some instances due to an increased chance of there being more than one item on the scale at a given time. This shortcoming may have led to incorrect determination of item weights, to weight-determining errors and/or to an inability to measure item weights. Any previous need for singulated and spaced arrangements may have impaired and/or prevented the ability of a shipping provider to recover revenue, for example, based on weighing and/or reweighing of items and may have required costly manual intervention and/or additional automation. Shipping provider operations that process a high number of items may have been faced with sacrificing any capability to measure items' weights in an effort to achieve targeted clearance times for items. Sacrificing item weight measurement capability may have previously resulted in a loss of revenue.
Customer charges for delivering items may frequently be based on the weights of the items, with greater charges accruing for the delivery of heavier items. In addition, or alternatively, shipping providers may charge customers a premium to deliver overweight items (i.e., items having a weight that is greater than some threshold value). More specifically, for example, previously if a customer provided a courier with an item and declared an item weight less than a threshold value at which premium charges would apply, then the shipping provider may have found it difficult to obtain full payment for shipping the overweight item.
In a disparate though perhaps related field of prior art, dimensioning technologies may have been used to determine dimensions of items on conveyors for the purpose of revenue recovery. While previous dimensioning technologies may have only been capable of determining individual item dimensions for items in a singulated and spaced arrangement, some of prior dimensioning technologies (e.g., the CS5200 or CSN210 MassFlow dimensioners offered by Mettler Toledo of Columbus, Ohio) may have been capable of determining the dimensions of items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement. The ability to determine the dimensions of items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement may have provided shipping provider and/or manufacturing operations with the capability of processing increased numbers of items without limiting the collection of item dimension information as, for example, the items do not require sorting (i.e., manipulation to achieve a singulated and spaced arrangement) prior to dimension determination. This previous technology may have (i) facilitated revenue recovery and/or (ii) reduced the time required to clear items from a facility towards targeted clearance times for items.
Notably, however, with respect to items having a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement, previous dimensioning technologies may have been limited by a failure to: (i) determine dimensions of items with respect to a conveyor; (ii) determine item dimensions downstream or upstream of the dimensioning apparatus; and/or (iii) interface with weight determining technology so as to also assign individual and accurate weights to single items.
Previous weight determining technologies may have been unable to determine individual weights of items in non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangements. Persons skilled in the art may have failed to appreciate the problems with the prior art, and/or exactly how previous weight determining and dimensioning technologies might be combined to best solve them. One or more possible combinations of such previous technologies may have been ruled out and/or overlooked by skilled persons as impractical or otherwise. For example, while dimensions of items in non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangements might be determined, some may have previously considered it necessary for the items to be manipulated into a singulated and/or spaced arrangement to facilitate the determination of individual item weights. Some combinations of the previous technologies may have used dimensioning devices to assess whether items were in a singulated and spaced arrangement.
What may be needed is a system, method or computer readable medium that overcomes one or more of the limitations or shortcomings associated with the prior art. It may be advantageous to provide a system, method and computer readable medium which facilitates the determination of item weight for items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement. The ability to measure individual item weight for items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement may help to increase the revenue associated with the conveyed items as: (i) there might then be no requirement for the costly manipulation of items, by manual or automated means, into a singulated and/or spaced arrangement; and (ii) the accuracy of customer-declared weight for each of the items may be audited.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to determine the weight of an item.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to determine the weight of an individual item included amongst a group of items (i.e., an item in a mass flow environment).
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to determine the individual weight for items regardless of their arrangement (i.e., singulated, non-singulated, spaced, and/or non-spaced).
It may also be an object of one aspect of the present invention to physically store, on a computer readable medium, instructions for execution by one or more processors to implement such a system and/or method.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method and/or computer readable medium adapted for determining the arrangement of items in a mass flow environment relative to other items.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method and/or computer readable medium to facilitate the generation of revenue on an item weight-adjusted basis.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method and/or computer readable medium to facilitate the attribution of dimensions and weights for individual items in a singulated, non-singulated, spaced, and/or non-spaced arrangement.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method and/or computer readable medium adapted for use in parcel delivery and/or postal applications to facilitate the movement of freight, and/or for use in association with the manufacture of items.
It is an object of the present invention to obviate or mitigate one or more of the aforementioned disadvantages and/or shortcomings associated with the prior art, to provide one of the aforementioned needs or advantages, and/or to achieve one or more of the aforementioned objectives of the invention.